TLSNF - Telia Company AB (publ) (TLSNF) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript
2024-01-26 14:53:02 ET
Telia Company AB (publ) (TLSNF)
Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript
January 26, 2024 3:30 AM ET
Company Participants
Erik Strandin Pers - Head of Investor Relations
Eric Hageman - Group CFO & Executive Vice President
Rainer Deutschmann - Senior VP & Group COO
Conference Call Participants
Andrew Lee - Goldman Sachs
Andreas Joelsson - Carnegie
Maurice Patrick - Barclays
Ondrej Cabejšek - UBS
Nick Lyall - SocGen
Jakob Bluestone - BNP Exane
Siyi He - Citigroup
Fredrik Lithell - SHAB
Keval Khiroya - Deutsche Bank
Viktor Högberg - Danske
Titus Krahn - Bank of America
Stefan Gauffin - DNB
Usman Ghazi - Berenberg
Presentation
Operator
Welcome everyone to Telia Company's Q4 2023 Results Presentation and Strategy Progress.
And with that, I will hand over to Telia Company's Head of Investor Relations, Erik Strandin Pers. Please go ahead. The floor is yours.
Erik Strandin Pers
Thank you, Sophie, and welcome, everyone, to this call, which is about our fourth quarter and full year results as well as our strategy update, which we've done every year in January since 2021.
Our CEO, Allison Kirkby, is still with us here at Telia. You may have seen her commenting on the results in media this morning. But as you know, she is moving on to BT in just a few days. So she's trusted us to do this call without her. As from experience, we know some of your questions tend to be a bit forward-looking in nature. So therefore, Eric Hageman, our Chief Financial Officer, will present the quarter; then Rainer Deutschmann, our Chief Operating Officer, will take us through that strategy update. After which, he will hand back to Eric to comment on the financial outlook. And I expect this to take about half an hour, and after which, we look forward to your questions.
So Eric, the floor is yours.
Eric Hageman
Thank you, Erik. Good morning, and welcome to our fourth quarter results and yearly strategy update presentation. I'm pleased to say that we continue to deliver on our key focus for this year, which is to maintain the profitable growth momentum in our Telco operations, and it's also pleasing to see that despite the weak advertising market in Sweden, we are starting to make some progress on our plan to return TV and Media to profitability.
Looking at the Telco operations, we delivered service revenue growth of 3.3%. Unlike previous quarters, growth is broad-based across all geographical markets, across both Consumer and Enterprise as well as across both mobile and fixed. Telco EBITDA growth was plus 5.4%, supported by service revenue growth, a decline in OpEx and a continued energy tailwind. For the full group, EBITDA growth reached 7.3% as TV and Media improved significantly versus last year, driven by the comprehensive cost restructuring, which more than offset the effects of a continued weak Swedish advertising market.
The structural part of operational free cash flow improved, as expected, by SEK 2.1 billion in the fourth quarter, driven by higher EBITDA and lower cash CapEx. For the full year, structural operational free cash flow reached SEK 7.3 billion. As expected, the working capital contribution was also strong in Q4 and had a positive SEK 4.6 billion impact to operational free cash flow.
Leverage came back into our preferred range again, decreasing to 2.32x on the back of strong cash flow generation and increased EBITDA.
Strategy execution also continued at pace, including 5G population coverage reaching 89%, and Telia Sweden, again, awarded Best Network in umlaut's yearly benchmark. On mobile NPS, we are seeing good progress too, with 6 consecutive quarters of improved score. And like I alluded to in the beginning, we see that all the efforts made to our Media business and now also is yielding results in the quarter....
Telia Company AB (publ) (TLSNF) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript